Slidable, climbable, hidable : exploring the theory of affordances for understanding person-environment transaction

References Clark, C., & Uzzell, D. L. (2002). The affordances of the home, neighbourhood, school and town centre for adolescents. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 22(1–2), 95–108. https://doi.org/10.1006/jevp.2001.0242 Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.The concept of affordances originates from ecological psychology, and concerns “possibilities for actions” as perceived by individuals acting in the environment (Gibson, 1979). An affordance approach recognises the agency of the physical environment from a transactional perspective wherein the person and environment co-constitute each another (Clark & Uzzell, 2002). Although ‘affordances’ as an idea has been adopted by occupational scientists, the associated theoretical origins are less well explored in occupational science literature. Therefore, this theoretical paper aims to analyse the concept of affordances and its use in researching occupation. The concept of affordances will be explored through a literature review of outdoor play research across disciplines. Playgrounds are environments for communities allowing the collective occupation of outdoor play among children and families. Disciplines such as ecological and social psychology, landscape architecture, geography and education have successfully applied affordance theory in environmental research, and there is much to learn from their insights. Affordance theory has evolved from an individual understanding of direct perceived action to a more context-based perspective of potential affordances shared by groups and communities in their environments. An affordances perspective allows a functional meaning-making in the analysis of the person-environment transactions. The concept of affordances recognises agency of the physical environment and equalizes the person-environment relationship. An affordance theory perspective offers us the potential to broaden the understanding of occupation by providing a means to express functional meanings co-constituted between the environment and the person